For Fatherland Scott Graham
('Co-Author
and Director'), Karl Hyde ('Co-Author and Composer') and Simon
Stephens ('Co-Author and Writer') interviewed a number of men on
their relations with their fathers and their own experiences being
fathers.

In Fatherland characters
named Scott, Karl and Simon
interview a number of men on their relations with their fathers and
their own experiences being fathers.

We are not talking
sparkling
originality or inventive dramaturgy here, folks.

To give the separate
interviews some semblance of structure they are broken up and
interwoven, one man telling part of his story, then another, then
another, and then back to the first for more, and so on. Some of the
interviews are narrated, a few dramatised and some sung.

At its best,
Fatherland achieves some moments of cumulative power, as something
said or sung by one interviewee resonates against something said
earlier by another.

At its far-from-best even
the central theme seems
forgotten, as a sequence about, say, an alcoholic father becomes
about alcoholism and not father, or the testimony of a firefighter is
staged as a tableau of heroic firefighters with nothing to say about
fathers or sons.

The musical sequences are
recited or shouted over a melody-less drone that too often muddies
the words and reduces them to incomprehensible sounds.

That
occasional moments work – the physical description of a father
paradoxically made real by the distortions of a child's perspective,
or a young father's joy at seeing his infant making him fly like
Peter Pan – seems almost accidental in the face of all the moments
that don't work.

Near the end of the
90-minute play one of the
interviewees rebels and accuses the fictionalised creators of
pirating other men's lives in order to work out their own Daddy
issues. Of course he's right, and the fact that we've sensed that
from the beginning has kept us at arms-length from the play.

We can't
escape the sense that Fatherland was created by Graham, Hyde and
Stephens for Graham, Hyde and Stephens, and that we've been
barely-tolerated eavesdroppers.